The feel-good NBA era

Current stars are likeable, the best teams in recent years were built from the ground up and distasteful franchises have hobbled themselves. The vibes are strong.

Good morning. Free Brittney Griner. Let’s basketball.

La Grenouillére, Claude Monet, 1869

I don’t know or care about NBA ratings at this point in my fandom and basketball writing career-hobby. I used to, for some reason. There was a point where I considered myself somewhat of an NBA triumphalist, heralding the league’s usurption of Major League Baseball as the nation’s second most popular pro sport and rooting on its drive to unseat the National Football League. I haven’t explored this internally in great depth, but what I would posit is that this boosterism was fueled by a deep fandom of basketball going back to my childhood and an actual love for the players and aesthetics of the dread years of the post-Jordan moment.

I came up as a blogger in the wake of the age minimum and dress code, in a time where there was so much hand-wringing over alienation of the Iversonian hip hop generation of star players. I really loved those players: not just the Kings’ stars I rooted on (my faves were Chris Webber, Hedo Turkoglu and Gerald Wallace, in that order), but Iverson, T-Mac, Steve Francis, Baron Davis, KG, Bonzi Wells, Vince of course, both Amar’e Stoudemire and Damon Stoudamire, Lamar Odom.

I started my Kings blog something like a year after Malice at the Palace. The era of the so-called “Jailblazers” and just as the Pacers were getting a dodgy reputation. A couple years removed from Kobe’s criminal sexual assault trial. There was a lot of ambient rage about the NBA and its players in sports media and broader sports discourse. A lot of poorly disguised racism. I was waiting tables and bartending, and perhaps feeling defensive about my NBA fandom in conversations around sports, even in the outskirts of Kingsland, which by that time was coming off of its glory era high.

I’m struck by how different the mood around the NBA is now.

Last year, we had two feel-good teams in the NBA Finals: the bottom-up Milwaukee Bucks, led by a generational superstar who stayed put in an era of player movement, and the Phoenix Suns, led by a wild stallion being tamed by a beloved coach and a (somewhat) beloved and universally respected old head. One team hadn’t won a title in decades, the other ever. 2021 was a feel-good and competitive Finals, won on a heroic effort by a well-loved player that still, a year on, hardly seems possible. Suns fans remain disappointed no doubt, as do fans of the teams that feel short of getting there. But the Bucks’ triumph doesn’t seem to have left a bad taste in anyone’s mouth.

This year, we have two more feel-good teams, even if one represents one of the most loathed franchises in sports.

The Warriors bring a triumphant narrative to the table: the emperors of the last decade, dismantled briefly and reconstituted for another ride to glory. Real Count of Monte Cristo stuff. Or Gladiator for the younger and less Francophile set. If only they were facing the Raptors in these Finals, or Kevin Durant’s team, or a team featuring LeBron. Anyway.

No one actually dislikes Steph Curry. Some LeBron stans give Steph s—t, and some members of the NBA edgelord community troll the Curry legacy for clout from fellow dirtbags. But Curry is an absolute hero to the younger generation of basketball fans. Every NBA basketball jersey worn by a kid in Northern California that I have seen over the past six months is an old Jordan jersey (10%) or a Curry No. 30 jersey (90%). This is not an exaggeration. Sure, it’s Northern California. I’m sure you’ll find some Kobe jerseys across the country, some LeBron jerseys in Ohio and elsewhere, some Lukas in Texas. But even those kids in Memphis, Tennessee were wearing Steph jerseys before Ja Morant shamed them into giving them up for Grizzlies gear! Kids love Steph. Adults do too, if literally any commercial break on television is an indication. (Speaking of which, shout out to the people who work Zach LaVine’s endorsements. Hustlers.)

Draymond Green is divisive but well-respected; Klay Thompson’s amazing story needs no embellishment. Everyone loves Kevon Looney, Gary Payton II, Jordan Poole, Juan Toscano Anderson. Look, we’re in such a place where Andrew Wiggins has a rising Q level. The Warriors annoyed a lot of people in the 2010s, especially from 2017 through 2019. But the script has flipped. This is a relatively warm and fuzzy team despite being in its sixth Finals in eight years. America loves a comeback story, and Golden State has it. (Plus, those T.V. ratings I don’t really pay attention to anymore indicate that fans LOVE watching the Warriors play basketball. It’s very unlikely any substantial share of that crowd is hate-watching the team.)

The Celtics as an entity are despised by most NBA fans who are not Celtics partisans. But remove the laundry and the current iteration of the Boston pro basketball team is a great, positive story. Jayson Tatum has a healthy dash of throwback 2000s heroball in him, a slightly less smooth and more direct Tracy McGrady, if you will. Jaylen Brown is electric athleticism mixed with high IQ mixed with skill levels that get more refined every year. Marcus Smart is a bulldog that harkens to what older fans love about basketball while bringing just enough pleasurable chaos to the proceedings to captivate those of us who do not long for ‘90s style East Coast ball. No reasonable person has ever said a bad word about Ime Udoka or Al Horford as basketball entities. And the team, with the exceptions of Horford and Nik Stauskas (hi Nik), is homegrown, just like the core of the Warriors (minus Wiggins), which is something lots of people say they really appreciate in the era of player movement.

It feels like the civic duty of all non-Celtics fans to root against the Celtics in all cases except when they are playing the Lakers, in which case the moral thing to do is root for an asteroid. This Celtics team makes that pretty difficult, especially because the Celtics haven’t been especially dominant in the past couple decades and all of the most disliked Celtics players are long gone from the league.

I don’t know that there is a moral rooting choice here for neutral fans — there are solid arguments in both directions. But it’s impossible to ignore the fact that there’s far more positivity around the top teams left standing this year and last than there has been in some time. These are feel-good teams we’re watching for the second straight season. It makes for a feel-good league. And that’s pretty cool.